Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy...
Submissive to everything, open, listening...
Something that you feel will find its own form.
--Jack Kerouac, from "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose"

October 19, 2005

For Those Who Like to Mock the New York Times

If you said aloud, "Computer, write me an article in which a New York Times food writer talks about moving to the Texas Hill Country and living next to a venison ranch," it would come up with this.

Included are priceless details such as:

• a vignette of hearing a venison chili recipe from the local postmistress

• a photo of the author in jeans and cowboy hat, cavorting with an antelope (playing with her food while it's still alive? -- though in this case the animal in question is spared as a pet)

• an explanation of how seeing her meat in its live state has made her "revere the meat more"

• the information that the word "venison" comes from the Latin "venari," meaning "to hunt"

• descriptions of "gutsy" venison burgers (I hate that word, it's so Eighties, so SILVER PALATE COOKBOOK. Imagine people who think their menu choice shows their courage. And what is a gutsy burger, anyway -- a burger made from intestines?)

• an appreciation of the complex flavors of wild game: "In each bite, there is mountain juniper, wild persimmon, sun-drenched limestone, a current of prickly pear and the cool eucalyptus scent of an agarita bush." (If you're biting into limestone, count me out.)

• a sentence beginning, "When I spent time cooking at a chateau in France..."